Overfiend

by David Annandale

‘Through reason.’ She gestured towards the floor of the cave. ‘Can you imagine us in league with the orks?’

  ‘With difficulty.’

  ‘Perhaps trust might be an element, too.’

  ‘No.’

  A wave of the hand, unconcerned. ‘No? A sense of the breath of fate, then?’

  Once again, he said nothing. He was sure he sensed a smile behind the helmet.

  ‘An alliance of the moment, then?’ she asked. ‘We are agreed?’

  He glanced at the warriors crouched on the catwalk and on the pipes. Tellathia’s words were pleasant, almost playful. The stance of the other eldar remained frozen at the last moment before an explosion of violence. ‘Do you speak for your kin?’

  ‘I will speak to them. Will you do the same?’

  He thought for a moment before answering. He made himself review the situation once more. There was much to be uneasy about. There was also little choice. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  She bowed, more deeply this time. She held her staff at an angle, pointing away from her body, aiming it at the cavern ceiling.

  Ghazan nodded. He walked towards the Scouts, turning his back to the eldar, showing that much trust. He spoke into his vox-bead. ‘Stand down, brother-sergeant.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We have found common cause.’

  ‘And you trust these xenos?’

  ‘We should stand down. We should not be at ease.’

  Kusala was reluctant. So, it seemed, were the eldar warriors. They did not lower their weapons at first. When Ghazan drew level with Kusala, he looked back. The eldar were carrying on their conversation by means as private as that of the Space Marines. Tellathia’s gestures were expressive, though. She seemed to be working as hard to convince her comrades of the wisdom of this course as she had with Ghazan.

  She prevailed. The eldar lowered their weapons. So did the White Scars.

  ‘Put the detonator away,’ Kusala told Ariq as the crimson warriors descended to the catwalk. They came forwards, stopping a few paces away. Tellathia stood at the forefront of the squad.

  ‘I will choose the path,’ Ghazan said.

  Tellathia nodded once. ‘That is as it should be for you. When our routes diverge, then so be it.’

  As Ghazan turned to go, he saw Tegusal gazing over the edge of the catwalk.

  ‘What is it?’ Kusala asked the Scout.

  ‘There is a lot of space down there.’

  Ghazan looked. Tegusal was right. The tangle of cables and pipes in the upper portion of the cavern had prevented him from noticing the fact earlier. All of the ork machines were concentrated in the centre of the chamber. Their periphery was very wide, clear, and level. ‘Room for large vehicles,’ he said.

  ‘The entrances too.’ Kusala pointed. Ghazan could just make out metal doors suitable for hangars at either end.

  ‘Their heavy armour must pass through here,’ Tegusal said.

  ‘A road,’ Kusala mused. ‘Perhaps there are other, larger points of access to the surface than we’ve found so far.’ He looked at Ghazan. He spoke quietly, though Ghazan was sure the eldar would hear what they wanted to hear. ‘We must explore that possibility. Something wide enough to let vehicles out…’

  ‘Would also let them in,’ Ghazan finished. ‘We will do as you suggest, brother-sergeant. In due course.’ Kusala looked like he was about to protest. Before he could speak, Ghazan said, ‘What we see here is important, but is not the whole truth of this facility. Isn’t that more important still?’ He was trying to meet Kusala on his own territory. The sergeant didn’t know what to make of Ghazan’s visions, so Ghazan spoke to him in terms of reconnaissance and intelligence. He didn’t know if he had convinced the sergeant, but Kusala nodded, ready to move on.

  The White Scars and the eldar crossed the rest of the catwalk. On the other side, the tunnels branched again. The widest passage sloped downwards, continuing forward. Ghazan chose it without hesitation. As soon as he saw the route it took, the sense of imminence became overwhelming. He was not far now. His opponent would soon emerge from the shadows of his visions and take on flesh.

  Even without the tug of fate, he would have known this was the right path. As it dropped and angled to the right before straightening out again, it was clearly moving into parallel with the great braid of cable and pipe that had headed out of the cavern in this direction.

  The descent was a long one. Once the tunnel levelled off, Ghazan became aware of a faint vibration in the walls. He tasted the air. It was dry, ozone-filled, sparking with latent energy. He was walking through the incubation of an electrical storm.

  ‘Do you feel it?’ he asked Kusala.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You will be satisfied for having trusted me, brother-sergeant.’

  Kusala grunted. ‘Perhaps so.’

  The first of the intersections approached. Both Scouts and eldar went forwards, neither trusting the other to do the job properly. Bokegan and one of the crimson warriors advanced to the junction. When they looked right, they stopped for a moment, then ushered the others forwards. ‘I think this is our goal,’ said Bokegan.

  Ghazan looked down the length of the short passage. It opened into another big space, this time at the level of the floor. His blood stirred. It burned. It was a form of exhilaration. He knew that he was looking at a destination, in the full meaning of the word. Revelation loomed. It took an effort of will not to charge into the cavern, roaring for his enemy. He held his war-thirst in check as both squads advanced.

  What he saw beyond the opening made him pause. Shock hammered Space Marine and eldar alike. In the corner of his eye, Ghazan saw Tellathia stagger. The spectacle before them was a great fusion of horrors. Manifest atrocity and monstrous implication vied with mystery.

  This was another space of complex machinery. Shouting orks rushed from one device to another. Energy crackled between gigantic electrodes. The jagged arcs were every colour of the spectrum, and some were no colour at all, wayward flashes drawn from the heart of the greenskins’ grotesque edifice.

  Its living heart.

  Beginning four metres off the ground, and rising to the ceiling, were rows of cylindrical cages. Like everything else, their construction was rough, a hurried welding together of sheet metal and bars, but they did their job well enough. Each was about a metre and a half in height, and a metre in diameter. Inside each cramped space crouched an eldar.

  The prisoners were emaciated and bruised. On the ones close enough for the details to be visible, Ghazan saw festering sores. Every one of the wretches wore a high metal collar embedded with crystals. The devices made Ghazan think of grotesque distortions of his psychic hood. Cables ran from the collars, connecting each to the next. More arcane energy flashed and sparked along their lengths.

  Beneath his armour, Ghazan’s flesh crawled, reacting to the dramatic rise in ambient psychic activity. The eldar prisoners were witches, every one of them. He was looking at an immense network of linked psykers. The fused pipes and cables from the previous cave arrived here, the cables plugging into the metal grid of the cages while the pipes split off to bring fuel to the machines at the base. On the far left, more cables twined away from the grid, passing through the cavern wall. The orks were using the eldar to power their project, though to what end, he could not guess. It made no sense that this was for any kind of manufacturing process. There was another purpose here, something that went beyond the construction of heavy armour.

  ‘What is this?’ Kusala whispered.

  ‘This is a generator,’ Ghazan said.

  ‘It is an atrocity.’ There was still no emotion in Tellathia’s surface perfection of Gothic, but there was anger in the words, and horror in her stance. The same was true of all the eldar. They were so taut, the air around them seemed to thrum.

  Ghazan’s gaze dropped down from the ranks of torture
d prisoners, back to the orks at work. Two of the greenskins stood out. One had so little flesh visible that it would have been easy to mistake the creature for part of the machinery. It was a large beast. Its arms were thick, its back broad. It was as tall as a man, but would have been taller yet if it hadn’t been doubled over by the weight of the equipment it wore. A metal-and-leather harness held a power generator, half the size of the ork, on its back. Its forest of conical coils glowed violet. Light refracted oddly around the ork, as if the brute moved within a not-quite-invisible sphere. It wore complex headgear and what looked like mismatched goggles, the scope over one eye narrowing, the other widening. One of its arms was bionic. The prosthetic was misshapen, oversized. Its hand was a power claw, and instead of fingers, a cluster of tools, burners and shears extended from the end of the claw.

  The ork walked back and forth before the entire length of the psyker network, supervising its operation. It beat underlings who weren’t working the machinery properly. It was constantly making adjustments, shoving its way forwards with a snarl to adjust dials and power levels. Its gestures were wide, sweeping, brusque. Ghazan saw none of the precision that was the hallmark of a Techmarine. Even so, the ork demonstrated great focus as it fine-tuned its creation – and the creation functioned. Greenskin technology was disturbing in its ability to perform brutal wonders when it looked as if it should simply explode at the throwing of the first switch.

  This machine worked. The orks had harnessed the power of dozens of eldar witches. Ghazan looked again at the rows of prisoners, a multitude forced to sacrifice itself for another’s will. The thought came that this was a monstrous parody of the Golden Throne. He hurled the idea away before it took root.

  The overseer of the machines was accompanied on its rounds by another ork. When he saw this being, Ghazan thought, At last. Here was his enemy. Here was the threat he had come to this system to fight. And it was another parody, this time of his own station. The ork carried a staff. Its copper shaft was festooned with iron bells, and topped by a configuration of bones and a skull. The ork had adorned itself with totemic symbols. Ghazan was disgusted that he could recognise anything at all in its iconography. To think that there was any impulse in common between these creatures and the proud heritage of the White Scars was obscene. The destruction of the greenskins was all the more imperative. Their existence was a mockery, an offence to the eye of the Emperor. And this ork was a special insult.

  It was also a special danger. Ghazan could see that at a glance. He had fought ork witches many times. They were explosive powers on the battlefield, dangerous, but closer to walking bombs than sentient foes. Their control over their abilities was limited. They were creatures of frenzy and storm. This one, though… Green energy spiralled in wisps from its fingers up and down the length of the staff. It glowed from the monster’s eyes, and leaked from its ears and jaws. A brace of small greenskins dogged its footsteps. They danced, gibbered praise and pawed at their master’s legs. The dispersing energy delighted them, but the witch ignored it and them. It walked with the tech and conversed with what passed for orkish calm. Their dialogue was barbaric, guttural snarls that sounded like fighting canines, yet their body language suggested a common cause rare in orks.

  ‘This is their collaboration,’ Ghazan whispered, the realisation startling the words from him. And still he could not imagine the purpose of the machine.

  ‘It is what we have come for,’ said Tellathia. ‘To liberate our kin.’

  ‘In one way or another?’ Ghazan asked. He felt no trust for the eldar. He did feel some sympathy.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That witch…’ Kusala said.

  ‘It is the figure in my visions,’ Ghazan told him.

  ‘It displays unusual self-control.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘How?’

  Ghazan shook his head. ‘I don’t know how. These orks are different somehow. Harder to kill. They seem more… energised?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Ghazan turned Tellathia. ‘Can you explain this?’

  ‘I cannot.’ She hesitated before answering.

  Ghazan watched the ork witch again. In the way it strode, in the grate of its laughter, it was a personification of the supercharged nature of the orks on this moon. Its tusked face and small, feral eyes gave it a look of animal stupidity. Yet it and its kind were waging a winning campaign against the forces of the Imperium, and somehow doing so thanks to having captured and enslaved dozens of eldar witches, each one of whom would have been mighty on the battlefield.

  Do not underestimate this ork, he told himself. For the xenos to have shaped his visions so powerfully, it had to be a danger of the highest order.

  ‘A lot of space here, too,’ Tegusal whispered. Running to the right and left of the opening was another wide strip of level, empty ground, with the same vast hangar doors at either end.

  ‘I count a hundred orks,’ Ariq put in. ‘We can kill them in moments.’

  ‘Not those two,’ said Ghazan, pointing at the architects of the savage machine.

  ‘We’ll need to seal the entrances,’ Kusala began.

  He was drowned out by the approach of a great roaring and clanking. The door to the left rose with the screech of unoiled metal. The roar became deafening, the sound too huge for even as large a chamber as this cavern. The White Scars and eldar withdrew deeper into the shadow of the tunnel. A Battlewagon passed before them. A score of orks rode it, cheering in anticipation of bloodshed. It rumbled across the cave.

  A hum built into a painful pressure around Ghazan’s skull. Beside him, Tellathia sank to her knees, clutching the sides of her helmet. In the cave, the ork activity around the controls of the psychic machine grew frenzied. The discharge of energies became a lightning storm. The eldar prisoners contorted in their prisons, their mouths stretched wide in screams too painful to be voiced.

  Ghazan heard the other door open. He risked edging forwards to see. He winced. The build-up of psychic energy was so great that it overwhelmed his hood’s ability to cancel out the incoming force.

  Beyond the door, in the next cavern, the floor was covered by a metal plate. It radiated energies in colours and pulses that mirrored those in the generator chamber, but with an even greater intensity. Towering coils surrounded its periphery. They were fed by the cables linked to the grid. The tank rumbled onto the centre of the plate and stopped. Its passenger orks hooted with delighted fury as the pulses became flashes, then a blinding sear. When Ghazan’s vision cleared, he saw absence and revelation.

  ‘Throne, no,’ said Kusala.

  The Battlewagon was gone.

  ‘A teleporter,’ Ghazan muttered.

  The chamber rocked with the laughter of orks.

  And another tank rolled by. Less than a minute later, it too had vanished.

  Chapter Five

  The first weapons of the White Scars’ attack on the ork tanks were speed and presence. Those alone were enough to distract the crews from the less interesting targets of the Mordian Iron Guard. Their first pass, bolters blazing, did little damage. But it relieved the pressure on the mortal infantry. The Mordian units, shattered by the untrammelled slaughter, began to reform.

  ‘You may pull back to the bastion,’ Temur voxed Colonel Meixner after he had strafed one of the claw-bearing vehicles. He turned sharply and began another run at the Battlewagon.

  ‘With respect, we will not,’ Meixner replied. He sounded exhausted. ‘We will fight at your side.’

  ‘There is no need–’

  ‘There is.’

  Temur understood. Already, he saw order returning to the Mordians. Their anti-tank weaponry began to fire with greater focus. As he closed in for a second pass at his target, a rocket slammed into the Battlewagon’s flank. The hit was a good one. The sides of ork tanks were never as heavily armoured as their fronts. The strike should have been
enough to pierce the vehicle’s hide and immolate its crew.

  The tank kept coming. The construction of these Battlewagons was far more solid than Temur was used to seeing. It was as if the orks had been swept up in a ferocious enthusiasm for their creations, building armour upon armour, gun upon gun. The tanks reflected the bursting rage and strength of all the orks he had encountered on this moon. The greenskins in this system were overdeveloped. They were explosive with the energy of war.

  ‘Draw their focus for me,’ he ordered his squad. He stopped firing and veered away from a direct approach, arcing around the tank while his brothers streaked towards it, drawing the ire of its crew. The bolters mounted on the bikes would be a distraction only. He would ensure that was enough.

  Temur throttled up, speeding ahead of the rest of the squad members. As they hit the front of the tank with a storm of shells, he turned in to the rear, braked hard, leapt off the bike and climbed up the hull.

  There were only a few orks riding on the outside of the Battlewagon. The rest had been stripped off by Imperial fire. The survivors ducked in and out from behind the fantastic, jagged protrusions that bedecked the hull. They raved and fired back at the White Scars, paying little attention to their own safety. Temur saw one take three bolter shells to the chest before he toppled to the ground. His corpse was crushed beneath the wheels of Standard-Bearer Kogegan.

  ‘I’m on,’ Temur voxed.

  The squad stopped shooting at the hull. The bikes shot past, then came around again, close enough and aggressive enough to keep the orks’ attention without shooting Temur. He hauled himself up with his left hand. With his right, he pulled Windstrike from its scabbard. The power tulwar was a relic that dated to the Seventh Black Crusade. It had been in the possession of the khan of the Fifth Brotherhood for four thousand years.

  Temur grabbed one more handhold and vaulted to the roof of the tank. There was an ork less than an arm’s reach away. It turned as he landed behind it. He thrust Windstrike forward. The balance of the tulwar was so perfect, its energy so attuned to its wielder, that it accelerated every movement. Temur’s blow punctured the greenskin’s metal collar and severed its spine. He whipped the blade free. There was no friction at all. It slid from the ork’s throat as if the brute were nothing but air.